Why some conspiracy theories just won’t die | Elise Wang | TEDxDuke

[Music] when i say conspiracy theorist who do you see is he and let's be honest it's he right unemployed uneducated maybe he lives in his mom's basement does he look a little like this so we like this picture this picture feels safe you know we feel no threat from this man and we're not this man we especially like this picture here at duke because it helps us to believe that education is the best defense against false belief but this itself is a false belief a comforting conspiracy theory if you will the contemporary picture of conspiracy

theory belief looks a little different than this first of all and let's just get this out of the way three-quarters of americans believe at least one conspiracy theory and the demographics depend on the theory so if we're talking about the theory that the moon landing was a hoax maybe we are talking about our tin foil hat man right the average believer tends to be male lower income lower education republican he also tends to be a little bit older if we're talking on the other hand about the theory that vaccines are a conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies

to make you sick and take your money the average believer is female and tends to be younger upper middle class with a post-secondary education and democrat and republican in equal numbers so what does belief look like today here's an example so in 2012 a young man about your age wanted to know what all the fuss was about trayvon martin and george zimmerman he didn't really watch the news so he went to wikipedia you know as you do which gave a fairly neutral account but someone had dropped a phrase in there black on white crime and

he was interested so he googled it and his first hit was the council of conservative citizens which is a white supremacist website he was hooked and he spent the next two years deep diving into similar paranoid forums finally posting a manifesto online that detailed this awakening which is how we know the steps that he took and then on june 17th 2015 dylan roof walked into a bible study in the black church and killed nine people hoping to start a race war so i've been teaching conspiracy theories for one year and here are a few things

that happened during that time so three adherents of the q anon conspiracy theory which if you don't know is the theory that trump and mueller are secretly working together to bring down the global ring of pedophiles bombed a mosque in minnesota another man sent half a dozen pipe bombs through the mail to prominent politicians and journalists who he believed were part of a globalist conspiracy and finally a man in pittsburgh believing that there is a jewish conspiracy to flood america with refugees walked into a synagogue at worship and killed 11 people and you might say

well these are not the conspiracy theories that i meant right my tinfoil hat man believes that aliens landed at roswell not these violent racist theories and you might be right the face of conspiracy theorizing has changed but we also forget that in their time these theories were polarizing and political and racist too as a student of mine pointed out the frenzy over ufo sightings and aliens at roswell can be linked to the same fear of infestation and infiltration that led to japanese internment so there is a growing connection between conspiracy theorizing and violence and many

have rightly recognized this as a crisis but the crisis of what it's a good question a popular answer is it's a crisis of media literacy of truth we're in a crisis of truth the argument goes that we're you know fundamentally rational beings that above all we really do seek truth it's just that in this post-truth moment we've been left without the tools to verify our facts as we would like to and the idea then is that this has led us to live in the divided times that we live in which can all kind of be

chalked up to some massive misunderstanding if this is true media literacy really would be the right answer it would help us to sift through information critically and to correct the misunderstanding ourselves so let's start with this proposed solution media literacy the first problem with this is that unfortunately it just doesn't work study after study has shown that being presented with information that contradicts a firmly held belief is more likely to backfire to make you cling to that belief harder than it is to change your mind the second problem with it is this so i took

this from a famous website but i've sort of blacked out the the society the society believes that there is a difference between believing and knowing if you do not know something and cannot demonstrate it by first principles then you should not believe it we must at the very least know exactly how conclusions were made and the strengths and weaknesses behind those deductions our society emphasizes the demonstration and explanation of knowledge so these are pretty sound media literacy principles right sound scientific principles for that matter the only problem is that it comes from our friends at

the flat earth society so unfortunately the core tenets of media literacy don't believe everything you read do the research yourself think for yourself are also the watch words of conspiracy theorists the final problem with this is that the premise is wrong so media literacy is designed to counteract misunderstanding the ideological equivalent of losing your way but dylann roof didn't lose his way his path online was not an aberration it is literally built into our media landscape in a couple of ways so first groups that are seeking to radicalize seeking people like dylann roof craft unique

search terms like black on white crime crisis actors false flag to take advantage of data voids where there are relatively few existing hits and then use those data voids to direct traffic to their sites secondly the tendency of content platforms to produce more and more radical content is not a bug it's a feature it's designed to keep you on the site the more exciting a video is the more likely you are to keep clicking and because you would quickly become inured to the same level of excitement the algorithm will recommend more and more radical content

the longer you're there so i did a little bit of an informal experiment on my own in august and i created a dummy youtube account you know with no watch history and i began watching a video on abc an abc video on the removal of silent sam so that's what this is and i watch that and i don't recommend trying this at home this led me in one click to a video on the unite the right rally in charlottesville produced by russia today which led me in one more click to a homemade hit piece on

heather heyer the woman who was murdered at that rally which led me in one more click to a video i'm not going to show us still of but that was produced by the largest american neo-nazi group four clicks from abc to neo-nazis so this helps us to understand why the path to conspiracy theories is easy to find but why do people go looking for it in the first place and why once they found it do they keep walking so one thing that we talk about in my class is that we all seek patterns they comfort

us and the more out of control we feel in our personal lives and our work in our world the more we seek patterns to compensate and this preference for patterns over noise for narrative over data is so strong that if the facts don't match our experience of things we will find a story that does and there's nothing shameful about this it has on the whole served us well communities unite over stories of their shared history and culture and our stories of ourselves of who we are and our values they're what guide all of our major

decisions even if we don't always live up to them in fact stories are how we unite and they're what get us up in the morning conspiracy theorists are no different people don't believe conspiracy theories because they're irrational or uneducated or they just don't have the right information far above truth people seek meaning and community and conspiracy theories create a community around the answer to a pretty meaningful question why do i suffer so at the beginning of the 20th century americans experienced the suffering that was caused by the world wars and the great depression as a

result of a social problem a collective problem a societal sickness i suffer because we all do but the social shifts that started in the 80s the great recession the end of domestic manufacturing the end of long-term employment most importantly for us we understood these things as things that happen to individuals and because of individuals so the root of poverty is your irresponsible behavior the root of climate change is that sometimes i forget to recycle the root of millennial financial precarity is that we spend our money on brunch right and so we've just decided to work

harder you know rebrand ourselves for a lifetime of transient work take on massive private debt and just hope for the best self-care ourselves out of mental health crises and when it doesn't work blame ourselves for not optimizing our time for not managing our money well enough for not getting the optimal summer internship for our resume i suffer because of me it's no wonder that some people reject this punishing answer and conspiracy theories are there with a happy twist on this it's not you it's the caravan coming up from the south to rob you and take

your jobs it's the muslims who are going to come in and put you under sharia law it's the chinese who are going to come in and ruin your culture i suffer because of them and with the them comes a we we who resist who are united in this awesome feeling of resentment q anon has a telling catchphrase they say where we go one we go all trust the plan they say who wouldn't want a plan you could trust and to work together towards a common goal in the face of all this what do the facts

really matter so unfortunately a realization that conspiracy theorists don't believe because they don't have the right information they're misinformed they're stupid it's a little bit of a double-edged sword it helps us to sympathize with their position but it also makes them responsible for it dylann roof was led and groomed yes but he also wanted to believe so confronting conspiracy theories is not about correcting a misunderstanding it's about conversion something any religious scholar will tell you is just not possible without the internal desire for it so what do we do so there's a very small thing

um but it's really one of the only things that we know that works and it's the reason you can't repeat that experiment i showed you earlier um the platforming so after much pressure youtube took down that account that i had blundered into um so you can't go back and do that please don't so we don't think that this should work but does everybody remember alex jones so for many years he got attention by calling sandy hook in similar massacres a hoax and by directing his supporters to harass the parents of murder children at the height

of his popularity he got 1.4 million hits per day and we all sort of wrung our hands about his popularity you know where there's a will there's a way on the internet and if we banned him from social media his supporters would only be emboldened as he boasted they would be but finally last august facebook and youtube took him down and twitter put him on a temporary van now think when was the last time you heard anything about alex jones d platforming works and to answer the obvious question this is not a matter of free

speech the principle of free speech is not the right to amplification on the platform of your choice part of believing in education as i think we all do is the knowledge that some ideas really are preferable to others this is the basis of peer review which is in turn is the basis of account of the academy you submit your ideas to a council of other experts and they decide whether they should be amplified so for example the idea that the tensile strength of a particular cable is 1500 megapascals is preferable to the idea that it's

3 000 if only because if you believe the ladder your bridge is going to fall down you're not forbidden from believing that it's 3000 and even telling anyone you want you also probably wouldn't expect your professor to invite you up to her lecture and proselytize to your classmates so the other thing that we can do is to stop treating this like a matter of fact an ideological debate radicalization is not about being misinformed it's about belief and anger and violence so it might be time to admit that deep diving into conspiracy theorists rationale and trying

to talk them out of it is a wasted effort and it's a distraction from action we can redirect our efforts to places where we can actually make an impact on the larger phenomenon one thing we can do is to start treating social media like the communities that they already are with standards of conduct and strong enforceable norms by de-platforming radicalizers and also trying to anticipate the ways in which they might take advantage of social media algorithms proactively protecting the people that conspiracy theorists target and finding a way to talk about our social problems that alleviates

this pounding i suffer because of me but takes real responsibility for the fact that we do still suffer together thank you [Applause]